Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday July 23, 2014 @07:48PM
from the by-your-powers-combined dept.

Deathspawner writes A lot of people have never been able to understand the logic behind Microsoft's Windows RT, with many urging the company to kill it off so that it can focus on more important products, like the mainline Windows. Well, this is probably not going to come as a huge surprise, especially in light of mass layoffs announced last week, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that his company will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release by next year.

Anyway, it'll be a little easier since they have full control of all Windows production. Nobody has to convince another distribution.

I'd love to see a single UI that works across 4" phones and 7" tablets with gorilla glass, and 13" laptops and 10" convertibles with membrane keyboards, and 24" desktops with 101-keyboards, and 60" XBox Ones with controllers but I'm not holding my breath.

History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

When you decide it's time to "unify" a single product, clearly you've made a serious, long-running mistake.

Having a dozen different versions of a single product is just a short-term way to milk a few more dimes out of your customers, and has a pretty severe long-term cost. It's most lucritive in software though, because it doesn't cost a penny more to manufacture the $300 version than the $100 version once you're finished with development. If it were a car for example, that leather interior is going to cost more to produce. But those "better bits" are free to produce. So it's creme, pure profit.

And eventually the customers get pissed. Which is OK if your'e not in it for the long haul. Which unfortunately is what Windows is. Bad match.

Yes... and no. In theory, if you did a virgin installation of Windows 95 onto a pristine new computer whose peripherals ALL had genuine Win32 drivers capable of running in 386Enh protected mode, and you ONLY ran "true" Winapps that bent over backwards to have no dependencies on realmode, DOS was basically a Grub-like stage 2 bootloader invoked by the BIOS that loaded Windows, kicked the PC into 386enh Protected mode, and handed it over to Windows. And you probably had a pet unicorn living in the back yard;-)

From what I remember, the compelling feature of Windows 3.11 that distinguished it from Windows 3.1 was native Win32 code for reading & writing (V)FAT filesystems on IDE hard drives (which gave it a HUGE performance boost compared to 3.1).

I believe that one of Win95's launch-time features was that Microsoft re-implemented the VESA BIOS extensions (and original VGA BIOS) as proper win32 drivers, so that manufacturers like Tseng and S3 only had to provide them with "miniport" drivers that did the grunt work that would have otherwise required them to fall back to realmode. I'm pretty sure the 386enh hooks for video BIOS emulation existed in 3.11, but the actual Microsoft-written code was given to vendors to distribute on their own disks & wasn't directly used by any video cards the day Win3.11 went to manufacturing. In a sense, Windows 3.11 existed to give videocard manufacturers a prototype platform so they could develop and test their protected-mode drivers on a released operating system.

You've got a pretty good memory. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in 386enh mode runs its own filesystem code in a virtual device driver instead of calling down to the 16-bit real-mode DOS. It isn't Win32, but it is 32-bit protected-mode code.

Chicago was what became Windows 95, DOS was present as something vaguely like a "kernel" although that definition doesn't fit well. The 32 bit mode stuff was layered on top of DOS. NT4 was the first shipping version that used the NT kernel with the Win95 interface, that was codenamed "Cairo" and was really mostly a shell update using the NT 3.51 underpinnings.

Supposedly some of the early betas (or alphas) were NT based and then they realized that making it DOS based would be more compatible with DOS (especially games) and use less resources, in particular memory.

Maybe if Microsoft had made different decisions in the mid-1990s when they had a compact real mode OS with a usable GUI running atop it, they could have ended up with something unified or unifiable. But that was then and this is now and the intervening two decades are water under the bridge or over the dam or something.

Wait a second, are you actually trying to argue that keeping DOS-based Windows instead of switching to the NT kernel would have been a good thing? That's just crazy talk!

You might, but I, at least, wouldn't because what you'd end up with was a UI that worked equally badly on all types of screens and wasn't really right for any of them. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, preferring to use Linux, but I will say that they're right in not trying to shoehorn a One True UI onto everything.

Before Windows 8, they tried the opposite with Windows CE - a desktop UI (start menu and everything) on small devices. That never got popular either.

Android makes it possible to actually replace the launcher. Windows Mobile didn't do that, and that is where they failed. Windows proper has pretty much the same problem, though. You can replace the Windows Shell (Explorer.exe) but your system will shit itself occasionally. Things just won't work right without an explorer process running. Leastways, this was true through Windows XP. I tried several of the popular shell replacements but all of them had this problem.

Unifying the UI is less important and desirable than unifying the underlying OS. I can understand having to re-write a more restricted UI for small displays - but the core of the application? In a different language even? That should not be necessary. Granted it was justified in the past, but mobile devices are powerful enough to run a real operating system now.

Since the tech behind it is DirectX 11 level, with multicore support as a first priority, it makes little sense to use something that old and unsuited.

Well, I shall attempt to dig through my various archives to see if I've stored the references. I'm not sure if I last looked them up before or after the period where I began using Scrapbook+ religiously. The stuff is hard to find now what with all the people making claims one way or another having taken priority in Google's database.

Are you stoned? A single UI for all isn't going to work. It's been tried again and again, and failed miserably each time. Why? Diferent formfactors do different things. What works on a tablet doesn't work on a PC or a Console. Case in point: Windows 8/WP8/Xbox Dashboard. It's a relatively consistent experience from device to device, the problem is the mode of usage has changed. There's your hangup right there.

A single UI experience (fixed and fluid layouts) isn't the right way to think about it. Doing that ends in apps that work well for one device but not others.

Web design has already solved this problem in the form of adaptive and responsive design. Make your app conform to the space it is given. Windows 8 apps have this capability, where many provide a somewhat different (phone-like) UI when in snap view, i.e. when the horizontal space is limited.

Now that might actually work out, so long as you've got extremely strict guidelines governing how it works and when it should kick into effect. It doesn't take much for an adaptive interface to completely fall apart just because a few cross-device apps don't play by the rules.

Microsoft have already done that. In Windows 8 they unified the Windows interface around the design for the vast number of Windows cellphones out there, leaving the totally insignificant Windows desktop/laptop market to wither. The overwhelming market response has justified this decision, in as little as twenty years Windows 8 could even overtake XP.

I'd love to see a single UI that works across 4" phones and 7" tablets with gorilla glass, and 13" laptops and 10" convertibles with membrane keyboards, and 24" desktops with 101-keyboards, and 60" XBox Ones with controllers but I'm not holding my breath.

We already have. it's called metro and it sucks. I'd rather see environments suited to specific types of devices..

I'd love to see a single UI that works across 4" phones and 7" tablets with gorilla glass, and 13" laptops and 10" convertibles with membrane keyboards, and 24" desktops with 101-keyboards, and 60" XBox Ones with controllers but I'm not holding my breath.

There are many benefits of a unified OS. If Xbox, Windows desktop, and Windows tablet all run under a single, unified OS, security updates can be pushed to all simultaneously, you can significantly reduce the amount of labor required to support all three, a

I had to use Windows Server 2012 for the first time a few days ago. Jesus Fucking Christ, I had no idea they had brought the Windows 8 Metro Hipster UI over to their server line of OSes. I couldn't belive it. It was damn near impossible to use.

Those are the only two Windows OSes that people actually use. It looked to me like they have already been fully unified. Both Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 are equally impossible to use effectively.

I'm sorry, PowerShell is a trainwreck of a language. Extremely unintuitive, inconsistent, cryptic.

Using a function? Call it as function($arg1, $arg2). Oh, did you write the function? Sorry, you'll have to call it as function $arg1 $arg2.

Want to pass a path to something? It's easy: -Path $path. Oh wait, $path is actually a real path and not a glob? You'll have to use -literalPath...if it's supported. Yep, we kept the same failed idea of CMD and decided argument expansion should be done by each command/function/program/cmdlet independently so that we can make damn sure nothing at all is ever consistent. There's a reason why every Unix shell, bash much included, handles argument expansion in the shell.

Sane variable scoping? Not from PS.

Want to use something from.Net? It's built in, a major selling point! Oh...sorry if the syntax is so incredibly buggered that it makes real world PowerShell/.Net code look like a bid for the Obfuscated Perl Contest. And once you get it "right", PowerShell can't grok anything beyond trivial. God help me, I had to craft and populate an IEnumerable of Tuple of String, String in PowerShell to pass to a.Net method (from DacServices). Finally crafted (looked like a spell incantation), it couldn't get through PowerShell to the method call in one piece. Flat out broken. Finally had to give up and just code a real C# console app to handle the 10 lines of code.

Want output/trace to display in the order you actually write it? When it actually happens? Better | Out-Default all of it or strange things happen.

Most sane languages, especially so-called "OOP" languages, actually stop when an exception is thrown by default. Typically with a default global catch that offers you a nice stack trace, or something. PowerShell? By default it keeps on trucking, not even a peep (bad old habits of CMD are hard to break I guess).

Misspell a variable somewhere? Or a method name? Not even a warning until runtime when it fails (but then keeps on trucking right along, happy to double down on the fail). Even Perl isn't that bad (at least with "use strict;").

PowerShell is better than CMD/Batch. But then, so is a swift kick to the head. It's a horrid language and a bad shell. Bash via Cygwin is a hell of a saner and more powerful way to use a shell on Windows. And if you ever need.Net something, do yourself a huge favor and do it from C# as a console app and call that...1,000,000,000 times better than trying to use the fugly hack of a.Net interface that PowerShell provides.

The special magic thing is to hit the Windows key + X. That brings up a menu that has pretty much everything you'd want to do from a start menu. Win + X also works on desktop Windows 8.x.

The hilarious thing to me is that the Windows 8/Server 2012 line is ironically the most keyboard centric version of Windows I've used, but all people want to do is bitch about the Modern (Tile) interface that you can completely, totally ignore if you're on something that has a real keyboard and mouse.

Wait until you have to REMOTELY administer the beast.The active areas in the corners of the screen function on the "Maybe" principle (Maybe it'll work, Maybe it won't.) So if you don't clutter up your desktop like thousands of idiots do, and stick umpty-bajillion shortcuts on your taskbar, there are times when, if the RDP+Metro session just "ain't feelin' it" and becomes a useless mess as you try to click around to get it to work.

So yourself a favor NOW and install a Start Menu replacement. You'll thank yourself later.

I've been steering clients clear of Windows 8 and Server 2012 for nearly 2 years now.

If Nadella fucks the next-gen stuff up and continues with "Tablet Interface 4 Every1", I'm going to be converting a bunch of clients off Windows and onto VMWare and Linux with some form of locked down VM solution. Because that'll be easier and cheaper than the Metro interface retraining costs for my clients.

People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

I have to agree. I think I understand why they want to do this: Only one code base, less overhead and more profit.

But it is a stupid idea. The different devices provide different functions and shouldn't look the same or be the same. Servers are different from desktops which are different from tablets which are different from phones.

For those who need a bad car analogy, it is like trying to put the same user interface on bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trucks and trains. No one complains that their car doesn't

Here's a real life car analogy... GM in the 80's "unified" all their drivetrains. The same engines/transmissions were available in the Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, etc. The only differences were in the style, body, and nameplate. It didn't particularly go over well with auto enthusiasts or consumers in general. The GM brands became rather superfluous, and consumers were quite lukewarm to the generic "all-in-one" options for GM cars. GM cars from the 80's are considered to be the worst built and least desirable of the company's history. You don't see any of those models still driving around with classic plates on them. Few consumers wanted them then, even fewer want to preserve them now.

Here's a real life car analogy... GM in the 80's "unified" all their drivetrains.

It wasn't just GM. Everyone who hadn't already done this (that is, everyone but the Japanese) did this in the 1980s. It is in fact the general trend for all automakers. VW Group exemplifies this tendency today. The 350 chevy continued to be a highly desirable powerplant for pretty much all purposes right through the 1980s, and up until they developed its successor, the LS1.

GM cars from the 80's are considered to be the worst built and least desirable of the company's history. You don't see any of those models still driving around with classic plates on them.

That has nothing to do with the engines, which for the most part were the same engines from the prior decade, and everything to do with

I think/hope you misunderstand. Where Ballmer really wanted to have one Windows to rule them all, with one crappy UI on all of them, I'm hopeful Nadella is talking more of a unified base with UI adjustments/differences as needed for each device type. You can have a unified release of the base OS with one style interface for tablets, another for desktops, and possibly another for servers. Windows Server has been doing this for a while, with some versions coming with full UI and others with just the CLI. They're a unified release - they come out at the same time and use the same base, but there are different UIs available, similar to one release of Slackware coming with multiple window managers and it being the user's choice which one to use (if any).

So, to give people their "bad car analogy" it's like selling an International DT466 engine in a school bus, a semi tractor, a very large pickup truck, a combine, and a tractor. It's the same engine ("unified release"), but the user picks the chassis/body appropriate for their need. If Microsoft can successfully pull that off, it will be a big win for both the company and consumers.

Running with your bad car analogy, they also package that engine for the subcompact and electric SUV models. It's just that you can't reach the steering wheel on the one, and it's entirely counter to why you would buy the vehicle for the other.

So, to give people their "bad car analogy" it's like selling an International DT466 engine in a school bus, a semi tractor, a very large pickup truck, a combine, and a tractor.

The thing is that the DT466, the T444, and even the IDI engines (e.g. A185) were all used successfully in all of those contexts, and people even swap DT466s into 3/4 ton pickups (let alone those other engines.) But shoehorning full Windows onto a handheld would be more like putting one of those engines into a roadster.

I don't really think this is all that stupid. I heard elsewhere that the OS will detect (will this need a new API and drivers?) what input methods are available and adjust the UI accordingly. In which case the UI will be different on different devices for intents and purposes. On the other hand all this is doing is making the products all use the same kernel and support the exact same run times. Linux has been doing something similar-ish for quite a while. After you

> I heard elsewhere that the OS will detect (will this need a new API and drivers?) what input methods are available and adjust the UI accordingly. In which case the UI will be different on different devices for intents and purposes.

That's.... actually... a really good idea. Microsoft would actually be innovative, and for once, ahead of the pack. I'm trying to wrap my mind around that.

Win8 (especially 8.1) already does this, to a small degree. Buttons and menu items are bigger on touchscreen systems, and I think the default state of boot-to-desktop-vs.-Start-screen is already input-hardware-determined. It certainly doesn't require any new APIs, much less new drivers!

With that said, yes, Win9/Threshold/whatever will be a more dramatic example. It's not new, though.

Even if they did, and I were to agree to their EULA, I don't like lifting my finger up to touch the screen. Some things that are reasonable for tablet computers are only reasonable for tablet computers. This might be one of them, but I'm not even sure it's reasonable for tablets.

They're not talking about the interface. They're talking about the underlying nuts-and-bolts stuff.

No, they're really more talking about the interface. The underlying nuts and bolts are already pretty much the same, in that Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone all share the same NT kernel. But above that there is plenty that's different from platform to platform. What Nadella wants to do is unify the development model and allow developers to create apps with UIs that react and readjust depending on the screen size of the device they're running on, much like how modern websites can support multiple scre

People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

They certainly can unify the PC and Tablet. They just have to give up on the insane idea that the UI will be identical between devices. The mouse didn't work on a small screen so they put the touchscreen on my 52" TV?!?! Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?

This is a very easy thing to fix... XP/Win7 style desk for PCs, Android style for anything smaller than 10", Remote/MediaPC controlls for TVs. And... wait for it... Alt-windows key toggles between UIs for those that like different ones at different times. Eeegads! Am I the next Wozniak with my insanely brilliant ideas or what? Oh wait... no, it's just that obvious.

Sounds more like he means he wants one OS that people can write programs for and have it properly scale to the device, within reason. I don't think he's talking about the GUI. One bit of information that supports this is how he's combining the various windows teams into one, so that you don't have one group making the desktop OS, and another making the phone OS, and a third making the XBox OS. One team builds and maintains it, so that each device type shares the same core functionality.
There will proba

Microsoft built their empire on using what they have to leverage into the next market. They can't do that if nobody wants what they are selling now, so they must have a working tablet/phone interface that people want. They tried Windows RT and it flopped because it couldn't leverage anything since it's not "Windows". Attempt 2 is making windows a tablet OS then all the desktop users will start to buy tablets with it. If Microsoft was smart they would make their own version of Android with a full Windows

Microsoft actually sold a highly-successful cross-platform Unix system for many years, back in the pre-NT days. You didn't think they ran the company on DOS, did you? They used Xenix machines extensively into the 90s, until NT was in a position to take over.

For that matter, back then NT had a POSIX subsystem and could run most Unix software with little more than a recompile. In case you're curious, by "back then" I mean "until Windows 8.1"; the POSIX subsystem is still available in Win7 and Win8. It's not a

In typical Microsoft "All heads in our asses" fashion, they release Windows 8 with two completely separate UI's.. One doesn't work at all for desktop.. and the other barely works for desktop. Hell.. opening a PDF in Windows 8 is still a goddamn nightmare.

What will we get:1. METRO 80's colors EDITION2. Cannot multitask edition3. Super fucking bloated edition4. We changed shit because we wanted to change shit and good fucking luck finding it edition5. We give you errors if you're not connected to the Internet edition6. We update your computer when you're trying to turn it off and take it with you edition

Bleh.. this was a minimal effort bitch session.. Microsoft already knows they suck and we only buy Windows because it's pretty much forced on us

You'd think someone would have thought to allow separate default apps for desktop/tablet mode. Launching a file from one mode only to have it open in the other is aggravating hell... desktop windows controls don't work well with touch input.. not on my 8.1 tab/laptop anyway. And if you went the other way, you find yourself in a crippled metro app that doesn't have the function you were looking for.

Actually, that's the job of the PC manufacturer. You know, stuffing the recovery partition with four dozen marginally useful programs that make you spend two hours to remove them after a Windows reinstall.

I am no MS fanboi. I did not RFTA. However, windows 9 is already supposed to ship with both touch and classic interfaces.The default will be chosen by device type but presumably it will be changable. The big complaint here is WinRT - which is ARM not Intel.

I would hope this unification means that there will be suffice emulation built into windows that it will pick the kernel/libs/drivers required by the CPU arch, and userland apps can run in emulation (even if slowly) if they are compiled for the wrong

Win NT had a hardware abstraction layer that supposedly made everything portable... I think you still had to compile applications to whatever native architecture it was running on though. Maybe they will go back to promoting.NET which ran bytecode? Who knows with Microsoft.

What the [redacted] do you mean "go back to" promoting.NET? Honestly curious. I mean, you obviously know [redacted]-all about it (among other things, while it compiles to bytecode in the typical use cases, it's executed as native code thanks to a JIT compiler that takes it the rest of the way for whatever platform it's on) but I'm not sure how you've missed the fact that it's the primary platform for Windows Phone apps (WP7 only supported Silverlight or XNA - both of which are.NET - for third-party apps;

I think Nadella is talking about a unified codebase, like Apple with OSX/iOS and Linux/*BSD, heck even Solaris (a few poor saps are still using that - those with Stockholm Syndrome might even comment here). It's really unlikely that Microsoft will drop the ARM arch - there are too many opportunities there.

Say what you want, but Nadella seems to be making decisions like an engineer, not a fat marketing stooge or a conniving aspie beancounter.

Scrap Windows RT and dump the locked-down bootloader. You might get a few extra thousand sales of Linux nerds who want an Android tablet/portable debian machine with a keyboard but occasionally need to reboot into Windows e.g. to run a touch-enhanced Visio that work requires.

If MS do continue with the ARM-based Surface, make it run the full Windows 9.

But emulation is a crutch and should be a fallback only. Shrink-wrapped x86-only software needs to go the way of the dodo. you'll have a nifty checkbox in Visu

Yes, please! Hell, just dumping the lockdown (or rather, making it optional) should boost sales a good bit; there's a fair bit of recompiled code already available (jailbroken) RT. Something with RT's battery life and hardware support, but able to run "real" Windows software, is a desirable machine for many people... and as you say, there's also many who would like to put Linux on it, and get an ultra-portable Linux machine that can also run Windows stuff at need.

I would hope this unification means that there will be suffice emulation built into windows that it will pick the kernel/libs/drivers required by the CPU arch, and userland apps can run in emulation (even if slowly) if they are compiled for the wrong proc. This would be a unified windows, that allows x86 and 64 bit apps run on ARM and vice versa (although the other direction is likely not as useful).

Unfortunately for you, the actual article says the exact opposite of the summary (so what else is new on/.?): Other than the kernel and the app development model, there will be no unified version of Windows. There will always be different flavors of Windows for different kinds of devices and even multiple SKUs of the same version of Windows for different markets (consumer, SMB, enterprise, etc.)

This may actually be a killer OS. It is the next version after a bad one!

Actually, all versions of Windows are bad, if you have ever experienced something decent. It's just amazing the crap that Windows users put up with, because they have never known anything else and think that computers are supposed to be flaky with fiddly controls. You have bad versions of Windows and really bad versions of Windows, that is the range, there is no such thing as a good version of Windows. So maybe a bad version of Windows will follow this really bad version, and maybe that will be enough to sl

BULLSHIT! What he wants is to make ongoing costs just like Xbox Live, skydrive, Office 365, and all the other crap they've tried to push. No thanks, I don't want to pay $1200 a seat over a decade to use Office, thanks. EVERYONE is copying Call of Duty and the DLC era. The new CEO of MS was in charge of cloud services! I am NOT paying a subscription to use ANYTHING from Microsoft. The end. He needs to get over that or get the fuck out.

The third link is not actually a link, since the <a> tag is missing the href attribute. I wanted to check what the CEO actually said, since "unify" could mean a lot of things.

Are they going for x86-64 only, killing the ARM-based WIndows RT, as Hot Hardware is reporting? They'd still have to keep ARM support for Windows Mobile. Perhaps they should have put Windows Mobile plus some tablet extensions on the low-budget tablets, that would have fit people's expectations a lot better.

Are they going for a single code base? In that case there would be multiple products created from that code base, so that doesn't tell us anything about the fate of Windows RT or any other specific products.

Are they going for a single product named Windows? While I think it would be good to drop the artificial home/pro/ultimate differentiation, having a different Windows for client and server use is still useful. Although that could be handled by having a different default configuration rather than an entirely different product.

After reading the article from dmbrun's post [slashdot.org], it seems what they're doing is a single code base, more shared APIs across Windows variants and a single store interface. So it's mostly focused on making it easy for developers to support multiple Windows variants. A smart move, but nothing revolutionary.

The title is very misleading.They aren't going to make a single build that runs everywhere. They are (already have) going to consolidate the different groups making different versions of Windows (phone, pc, xbox, embedded etc) into one group. They are also going to make one store and one app platform. Things will still need to be compiled for different architecture.

If I could have a Win 7 style interface on my desktop / laptop. I really good touch interface for my tablet / phone and a really good lounge room interface for my xbox that could run the same software across all 3. Now that would be cool! RT wasn't crap because it was a different interface it was crap because it felt like it should run the same stuff as normal windows but didn't

Good: Plug phone into dock, phone interface disappears, desktop interface comes up. Unplug phone, and it reverts. You carry all your files with you. You go to a dumb monitor + keyboard + mouse anywhere and *poof* you have your desktop with you, and it's online because your phone has data. Yeah, it'll be a bit slow - so don't do heavy number crunching and you're fine. And they'll need to make it impossible to run phone apps in desktop mode or vice versa. Some things must be disallowed (although crafty softwa

Making a single OS that works well for tiny phone screens as well as huge desktop monitors is like trying to make flying cars. It sounds great, and they promise it will fly like a plane and drive like a car... but instead you always end up with a bizarre contraption that flies like a car and drives like a plane.

So many negative comments here... as if people think that a unified OS must also mean a unified UI.A single core codebase for the OS will have a few problems with performance on different hardware, but that is a separate discussion... and who expects Microsoft stuff to run quickly anyway?However, incorporating a different UI for each target device means that you should not need to see the craptastic Metro UI on a desktop system or workstation, while touchscreen and small screen systems are not compromised by a need to develop elements for discrete keyboard and mouse input.

I think you must have heard this when reading the writings of Isildur, after the battle of Dagorlad.

Windows Three for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Windows Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Windows Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One Windows for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Windows to rule them all, One Windows to find them,
One Windows to bring them all and in the darkness bind them